Warlocks are former arcanists, or in the case of the orcs, former shamans, who, in pursuit of ever-greater sources of power, have cast off their studies of the arcane or nature magics to delve deeper into the darker, fel-based magic of shadow.

Warlocks are renowned for their damage over time (DoT) spells and sinister Shadow magic, as well for summoning demonic minions and their ability to wreak havoc with destructive Fire spells. Warlocks can specialize in any of these areas: Affliction warlocks are the masters of damage over time, draining their targets' health with an array of powerful debuffs; Demonology warlocks summon improved Demons to do their bidding, drawing power from their minions and even transforming into Demons themselves; while Destruction warlocks call down a rain of fire upon their enemies, specializing in potent burst damage and Fire spells. According to the WoW Census, warlocks are the least represented class.

Warlocks are often maligned and mistrusted due to the nature of their powers.

Contents

Background

Warlocks are masters of the dark arts, devoted to furthering their understanding and use of shadow and Fire based magics, along with the summoning of demons from within the Twisting Nether. They first appeared on Azeroth during the First War, when Gul'dan, the first of their kind among the invading orc clans of Draenor, led the Horde across the dimensional gulf through the Dark Portal while in servitude to the Burning Legion.[1][2]

Warlocks are used as damage dealers, but can store the target´s soul to resurrect or heal himself by draining enemy's life. The warlock can summon an Imp without a Soul Shard. However, other demons require a soul shard or other reagents to be summoned. Since patch 4.0.1, a reagent is no longer required for this. Warlocks can instantly summon minion with the newly added spell: [Soulburn].

History

The eredar of the Burning Legion are credited as the original warlocks and wielders of dark magics, corrupted from the powerful and magically attuned eredar of Argus.

In most societies, the warlocks now live on the fringe of civilization, tolerated but not trusted. Human warlocks meet in secret in the basement of a bar in Stormwind (The Slaughtered Lamb in the Mage Quarter). Thrall has expressed discomfort with the warlocks but understands the necessities in using them so he has allowed them the Cleft of Shadow. Conventional spell casters often see the warlock's magic as a vain attempt at increasing their own power.

Although many that consort with demons fall to darkness, the warlocks of the Horde and the Alliance advocate bending demonic forces to one's will without succumbing to complete corruption. These spell casters can summon demons to serve them, and they can also cast many painful spells that slowly eat at the life of their enemies. Warlocks are usually physically weak compared to other classes, but they compensate for this deficiency with their potent array of spells and their demonic minions. Compared to other spell casters, warlocks are among the strongest and often depend on the sacrifice of their own blood to fuel their magical powers.

Notable warlocks

Overview

Warlocks are unique among the DPS caster classes because of their ability to convert health into mana. They can be + damage or + damage & crit players. Warlocks have the most powerful assortment of damage over time (DoT) spells when used in conjunction, and also the most variety in debuffs and summonable minions. Just like a mage, a warlock’s crowd control abilities appropriately used can stave off certain doom for the warlock and their allies, and the warlock’s sustained burst damage when suitably specced and geared can rival those of a mage. However, the warlock’s area of effect spells are not as varied as those of their mage brethren, although when used appropriately they have powerful applications in group play.

Warlocks are well versed in the "shock and awe" tactics of warfare, and their manipulation of shadow energies can send their opponents reeling in Fear. At low levels, warlocks rely primarily on minions and damage over time spells to deal damage while fearing their enemies to prevent retribution.

Endgame warlocks either choose to maximize the effects of their DoTs and curses through the Affliction tree, increase the utility of their summoned minions and stones through the Demonology tree, or lay waste the opposition with burst damage and direct damage spells in the Destruction tree. In previous versions of WoW, the 8-debuff and 16-debuff limits prevented warlocks from maximizing their damage output through affliction spells, and warlocks were relegated to chain-casting their direct damage spells to maintain DPS in PvE raids. This has changed and there is now no reachable debuff limit, and affliction DPS is now competitive in a raid environment.

Being a warlock demands certain things: being able to engage multiple targets simultaneously while keeping tabs on your minion, to make split-second strategic decisions on cast rotations depending on the situation, careful shard management and even more careful aggro management. Being a warlock also rewards many things: they are PvP powerhouses due to naturally high stamina values, the ability to apply debilitating crowd control abilities, and in PvE their damage output in multiple target situations can rival those of other DPS classes who focus fire on a single target.

Their ability to drain and use souls as Soul Shards is also appealing to many.

Weapons and armor

Warlocks can wear cloth armor only, and can equip staves, daggers, wands , and one-handedswords. Warlocks in particular benefit from off-hand items with increased stats equipped with a dagger or one-handed sword that confers increased spell power or other stats that otherwise complements the off-hand item. Staves also offer many warlock-friendly stats, but almost all of them come with stats that offer little benefit, such as Agility, Spirit, Frost damage, etc. Equipping one-hand items allows for finer control of these stats.

Attributes

Stamina is one of the key warlock attributes, especially for warlocks specializing in demonology. The main reason for this is that warlocks can use Life Tap to convert their health to mana, thus allowing stamina to mostly fill the role for intellect as well. Many warlocks also depend on large health pools as their main source of defense. As a primarily spell caster, the warlock also has great use for all the standard caster attributes, such as intellect and spell power, but no use for strength or agility. Spirit is of moderate value due to Fel Armor which returns 30% of the warlock's spirit as spell power. Warlocks who use Glyph of Life Tap can increase their spell power by an additional 20% of their spirit value.

The value of other attributes — spell crit, spell power, spell hit, resilience and haste — depends to some degree on the warlock's talent spec and play style. Spell crit is more useful for direct damage spells, especially with Ruin. Affliction warlocks, who rely more on DoTs, will benefit more from spell power than from spell crit, at least until training Pandemic. The demonology talent Demonic Knowledge gives the warlock bonus spell damage based on their minion's stamina and intellect, which are bolstered by the warlock's own stamina and intellect.

In a raid scenario, spell hit rating takes precedence over all other stats, and it is advisable to reach the spell hit rating cap (17% as of 3.0.2), taking Suppression into account for affliction warlocks. After that point, spell hit rating is useless; spell-hit-crippling debuffs are too few and far between to be considered.

In PvP for warlocks, the focus is somewhat different as survivability takes precedence. warlocks often choose to sacrifice DPS in order to obtain higher survivability in high end arena, regardless of talent choice.

Below are some examples of the relative attribute values for a warlock (in descending order).

Personal play style and raid makeup will cause this prioritization to vary from player to player - for example, demonology warlocks with very high crit ratings can out DPS similarly built warlocks who have focused on haste or spell power, while bringing more Demonic Pact coverage to the raid.

Soul Shards

Prior to patch 4.0.1, some of the warlock's skills and spells relied on the Soul Shardreagent. They were obtained by killing an enemy that yields experience or honor with the Drain Soul spell (upgradable with the [Glyph of Soul Consumption]). Since soul shards did not stack, they used up a lot of space in the inventory. Special bags existed that could only contain soul shards, e.g. Abyssal Bag. The maximum amount of soul shards a warlock could carry was 32.

Since Cataclysm, Soul Shards are obtained by channeling the Soul Harvest spell or by using Drain Soul. But also the way soul shards are stored changed. Instead of using up space in the inventory, soul shards are now a part of the user interface, similar to runes. If a soul shard is consumed with the Soulburn spell, certain other spells get empowered or become instant casts (e.g. Soul Fire).

Abilities

A warlock's DoTs are the bread and butter of their arsenal, regardless of talent specialization. The warlock's direct damage spells are either Shadow or Fire based. While a warlock's direct damage alone does not compare to the mage, when coupled with their DoTs and a minion they can achieve strong, steady DPS to rival that of other classes. Some of a warlock's most important spells are channeled, and they can be protected from interruption by damage, using the Fel Concentration and Intensity talents. The warlock has available a variety of curses and banes, but only one type can be cast upon an enemy at a given time. This creates the need for determining an appropriate Curse or Bane in a given situation. The affliction talent Amplify Curse reduces the global cooldown of all curses by 0.5 seconds.

The warlock has several other valuable spells at their disposal, such as utility spells.

Minions and mounts

Warlocks can summon a variety of minions, each exhibiting different skill sets which are useful in different situations.

Imp is a warlock's first minion, providing ranged damage initially and useful passive abilities and procs at higher levels.

Voidwalker, available at level 8 makes an excellent tank for a soloing warlock.

Felguard (warlock minion), available to warlocks upon specializing in the Demonology tree, is a warrior-type tank that deals more damage than a Voidwalker, and has other increased tank-type capabilities at higher levels.

Succubus is a female demon that offers arguably the highest damage output. She also has two useful crowd-control abilities, [Whiplash] and [Seduction], and is very good for PvP.

Felhunter is a demon pet that increases the warlock's intellect through [Fel Intelligence] and also has some powerful magic debuffs that work both offensively and defensively. A useful PvP pet against caster classes.

Healing and conjured items

Another powerful ability of the warlock is to create Healthstones and Soulstones. These conjured items are used from the inventory, and only one each can be created and held at one time. Healthstones and Soulstones will disappear if the player logs off from the warlock character for more than 15 minutes.

A warlock is by no means a healer. However, healthstones can be given to party members, and soulstones can be cast on party members.

To heal others (or himself), a warlock can create a Healthstone and hand it to another friendly player via Trade. These can be improved through talents. Burning Crusade introduced the Ritual of Souls which creates a Soul Well from which Healthstones can be extracted by members of the party or raid group (10 or 25 depending on Ritual of Souls rank).

A warlock may use a Soulstone on a friendly player (or herself) before they die (15 minutes Buff duration and Cooldown), allowing them to resurrect on death without having to use a Graveyard. If a warlock uses a soulstone on another member of their party and the warlock or that member leaves the party, the buff is dismissed.

Melee

While the warlock can wield and attack with melee weapons, this is generally not recommended as the warlock's melee abilities do little damage in comparison to their array of offensive spells (exception: a warlock under the effects of Metamorphosis, a demonology talent). Generally when an opponent gets within melee range the warlock's best bet is to use disabling spells such as Death Coil, Fear, Howl of Terror or Curse of Exhaustion to get away from the enemy.

If acquiring range is not possible a warlock is by no means helpless. Defensively, a warlock can share his damage with his pet via Soul Link, and reduce damage received with Demon Armor. Unlike a Hunter a warlock's ranged abilities have no minimum range and their powerful offensive spells can still be used to deal damage to opponents that are very close, though the spells will be more difficult to cast due to spell pushback caused by taking damage.

Destruction - Destruction talents are largely based on increasing the effect of a warlock's Direct Damage spells, making them (and their dps pets) cast faster, crit more often, and ultimately deal more Burst Damage. Destruction's strength is its ability to quickly kill the enemy. Key talents include Improved Shadow Bolt, Conflagrate, Ruin, Shadowburn, Bane, Backlash, Shadow and FlameEmpowered Imp, Shadowfury, and Chaos Bolt. Destruction is the only spec with high damage instant cast spells to quickly finish a fight, and the least mana efficient among the trees as well (however, all warlocks are still the most mana efficient class in the game due to their ability to steal health and use it to regain mana). The damage potential of the destruction Tree rivals a mage when properly specialized, as well the added benefit of pets. Specced with Destruction, [Rain of Fire], is the most damaging AoE ability in the game.

PvP centric warlocks may look to the gathering style professions - specifically Mining for Toughness and Herbalism for the self-heal Lifeblood. The additional crit chance provided by Skinning, Master of Anatomy, applies only to melee and ranged damage, and does nothing for spellcasting.

The remaining professions do not offer anything particularly warlock-specific, but, depending on server economy, may provide significantly more income.

Note: It is HIGHLY recommended that warlocks learn the secondary profession, First Aid. When running randoms, it is better to able to heal yourself after using Life Tap than to rely on the healer since you are effectively draining their mana which is needed to heal party damage taken. This will help reduce healer down time and allow them to focus on healing the tank.

In-game expectations

Warlocks are taken to raids for their incredible dps and their raid utility. A warlock's abilities can bring a lot of support to parties, and they are usually biggest source of ranged DPS. Seed of Corruption, when properly used, makes a warlock extremely effective AOE DPS without putting the raid at risk. Using summon in order to teleport late comers, conjure Soulstones for raid recovery, and distribute Healthstones. Warlocks are also well known for their unique CC abilities such as Fear, Banish, Enslave Demon, Shadowfury, and Howl of Terror.

When doing raids, the warlocks normally assign the responsibility of casting curses between each other. Effective use of curses is expected. It's a warlock's responsibility to know what curse to use in a given situation unless the raid leader requests otherwise.

Due to a demonology warlock's great endurance and survivability, warlocks are also great for tanking Leotheras the Blind in Serpentshrine Cavern - repeatedly using Searing Pain makes the boss attack the warlock from a distance, allowing the melee DPS to stay close to the boss and avoid his Chaos Blast ability. Warlocks also play an important part in the Illidan fight as they must "Tank" Illidan during one of his phases.

The Burning Crusade has brought more utility to warlocks than before. The addition of the soul well has made distributing healthstones a much simpler and convenient process. With Patch 2.4, warlocks finally are able to summon through instance barriers. This makes replacing players in a mid-raid scenario significantly more convenient.

Wrath of the Lich King changes

Warlocks deal impressive damage through the careful combination of damage spells, dots, and pets, and their new talents and abilities reflect this role. In many cases abilities have had their damage increased or their mana cost reduced, making them more efficient for the warlock to use. Talents have been consolidated and moved in the tree to give you access to some important talents earlier on. In addition, summoning your dreadsteed or felsteed no longer costs any mana and does not affect your global cooldown so that your mounts work just like everyone else's.

The most significant change to the warlock is the way your pets are handled. All of the demon master trainers have vanished! Instead, all demon abilities and spells are automatically learned as pets gain levels. Gone are the days where you have to spend coin to not only train yourself but your pesky demonic friends as well.

There have been some changes to the demon abilities. For example, they automatically learn avoidance at level 10. Blood pact now works for the entire raid, making it unnecessary to stick a warlock in a particular group. Consume shadows now also greatly increases nearby allies' stealth detection. Some abilities have been removed completely and new ones put in their place, like fel intelligence and shadow bite have replaced paranoia and tainted blood on your felhunter. Overall, your pets have received the same love given to the other classes in the game, making them better, stronger and more fearsome.

Soul Shards

The soul shard system is receiving a massive revamp, and will now become a core feature of the warlock class. Soul shards will no longer act as an inventory item, but rather exist as a resource, and appear below the warlock's health and mana bar. A new spell, Soulburn, will be the only warlock ability to cost a soul shard, and will empower most of your other spells to behave differently. For instance, when combined with Fear it causes the spell to become instant. Other examples include: guaranteeing your Searing Pain spell three critical hits, increased horror effect and additional healing from Death Coil, and instant summoning from your summon demon spell. Soul shards will regenerate quickly upon leaving combat, and you may also be able to use drain soul as a "soul shard evocation."

General preview

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, warlocks will receive changes to their class talents and abilities. Outlined below are some of these changes. Keep in mind that this is an early preview and that these modifications are still under development, so you may see further adjustments to the listed changes as we get closer to launch. That said, here is a first look at these new warlock spells and abilities!

New Warlock Spells

[Fel Flame] (level 81): Quick-hitting spell dealing Shadowfire damage. This is similar to the mage ability [Frostfire Bolt], in that the lower of the two resistances (in this case shadow and fire) on your target will be used for calculating its damage. Additionally, Fel Flame refreshes the duration of [Immolate] and [Unstable Affliction]. Our goal for Fel Flame is to provide a spell that's good for mobility and for use by Destruction and Demonology specs. Also, did we mention it uses green fire? Yep. Instant cast.

[Dark Intent] (level 83): Increases the target's chance for a critical effect with periodic damage or healing spells by 3%. When the target lands a crit, you get a buff to your damage for 10 seconds. This effect stacks up to three times.

[Demon Soul] (level 85): Fuses the warlock's soul with his or her demon. This provides warlocks with a self-burst cooldown to use. The specific effects granted by Demon Soul depend on the demon chosen. Demon Soul lasts for a certain number of charges or until it expires (around 20 seconds), depending on the demon used. 2-minute cooldown.

Soul Shard Overhaul

This major change regarding Soul Shards was previously announced at BlizzCon 2009. Soul Shards will no longer be inventory items, but instead a new UI resource mechanic. Warlocks will have 3 Soul Shards that can be used during a fight and will not be able to gain additional shards during combat. Soul Shards will not be required outside of combat. [Soulburn] will consume a Soul Shard resource, thereby allowing you to use the secondary effects of some spells. Soulburn has no mana or health costs and is off the global cooldown. Planned secondary effects are outlined here.

Next you will find a list of some of the warlock spell and talent changes for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

All warlock damage-over-time (DoT) spells will benefit from crit and haste innately. Haste will no longer act to reduce the DoT's duration, but rather to add additional ticks. When reapplying a DoT, you can no longer "clip" the final tick. Instead, this will just add duration to the spell, similar to how [Everlasting Affliction] currently works.

Metamorphosis will no longer be subject to demonic crowd control. Furthermore, abilities available only while under the effects of Metamorphosis will be altered to put more emphasis on the warlock's own spells.

[Shadowburn] will now do additional damage to targets below 25% health.

Well that concludes this Cataclysm preview for the warlock class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

Clarifications

Here are a few points of clarification on some of the popular questions or concerns we're seeing.

On regenerating shards in combat, we will add a mechanic to regen shards if we find that we need to in order to handle variable combat length. We haven’t added one yet because we really want to emphasize locks using shards at the right time and not as fast as they can with then an [Evocation]-like spell to bring them back again. These are supposed to be special moments in a fight -- think [Bloodlust] perhaps -- and not used every 20 seconds on cooldown (or whatever the cooldown ends up being).

Demon lovers, we haven’t ruled out adding a new demon, but we want to be very careful here. We’ve had a hard enough time finding niches for some of the current ones. So we first want to make sure existing demons are cool before we’re faced with Q&A several months from now asking why the new demon either isn’t cool enough, or why warlocks no longer use, say, their felhunter because of the new demon.

Whiplash works similar to Freeze on the mage’s Water Elemental. It requires a targeting reticule. It isn’t just a melee ability that the succubus uses at-will.

As a clarification, we are removing Soothing Kiss, not [Seduction]. Soothing Kiss increased the chance the target would attack something else. Seduction is the crowd control more commonly associated with the Succubus, and it’s not going anywhere. ;)

We did mean to cover doomguards and infernals, but they didn't make it into our preview. Our plan is that you can summon a doomguard or infernal as a cooldown-based pet, much like the shaman elementals, without having to give up your current, permanent demon. If we add a new demon it will likely be one of these cooldown-based ones, and not a permanent pet like the imp, voidwalker, succubus, felguard or felhunter. We’re just not convinced there is a niche for a new permanent demon (and perhaps not even a temporary one).

Flying mounts and female Metamorphosis forms are great ideas and something we’ve had on the wish list for a long time. We can only create so many new creatures during a single expansion, and getting one of these might mean fewer new creatures in outdoor worlds or dungeons. It’s just a trade-off and sometimes you have to make hard calls. We’ll keep them on the list though.

We do like the idea of allowing warlocks to re-skin their demons and have been talking about possible ways to implement this. I have no concrete information for you at this time beyond that.

When it comes to naming demons, this has always been one of those sacred cows, where the hunter gets to name their pet because he loves his pet bear, but the warlock considers the demon to be something disposable -- a tool.

The Demon Bolt debuff will only affect the warlock's demon, not other demons. We wanted a Demo-themed nuke that made it feel like the pet was part of the damage.

For Soul Shard bags, we will probably do something like remove all the shards, reduce the bag size (a little) and convert it to a normal bag. This would be a one-time conversion. We'll probably get rid of the recipes, as we wouldn't want other classes to go out and get shard bags just to get a free bag.

Videos

Macros and addons

Power Auras Classic is an addon for managing buffs, debuffs, auras, activated spell and ability timers and cooldowns, and a LOT more. It allows the user to track these specific things and create an images or icon on the screen for notification purposes. It also supports playing sound files and custom user graphics (targa format). Example screenshot: Screenshot The spell icons not on the cast bar are being monitored by what is on the dummy and for how long (when applicable) and also if either Shadowfury or Chaos Bolt are on cooldown.

Bartender 4 is a cast bar enhancer. It allows up to 10 cast bars, a totem, pet, stance, and a vehicle bar. Some of the options include changing the alpha (visibility) of the cast bar, how many rows and columns per each bar, the location, size, and orientation of the bar, and under what conditions the bars appear under. It also supports modifying "special" cast bars such as vehicle weapons and the bite spell during the Queen Lana'thel fight in ICC.

Necrosis LdC is based on Necrosis 1 by infernal. It is described by its author as "a mod to help warlocks managing their stones, shards and summoning of demons". It provides sound notifications for various events, for example when Nightfall or Backlash combat states occur. It also has the ability to send party/raid notifications when casting SoulStone, Ritual of Souls, Ritual of Summoning — and many other messages, which can all be customized. As such, this is a very useful addon and perhaps the most widely used of all the warlock specific addons.

DoTimer is an addon that times DoTs that you cast on other people. It supports all classes. There are four functions performed by DoTimer: the base DoT timer, a cooldown timer, a communications addon that lets you communicate your timers to others in your party, and a customizable notifications addon that can be set to notify you or others of specific events.

Natur EnemyCastBar shows all buffs and debuffs on your character making it exceptional for raiding.

ForteXorcist (also here) shows spell timers, cooldown timers and messages that you can set for yourself or the raid. On top of that, it also offers support for tracking Soulstones, shards and healthstones as well as a summoning assistant. Also, although the addon is primarily targeted at Warlocks, ForteXorcist can also be used with the other classes. In essence, ForteXorcist provides what Necrosis and DoTimer does with a few added extras.